Since YouTube's the most-visited video site on the internet by far (and one of the most-visited sites of any kind), I don't see any evidence that they're failing to deliver the content people want.
The discount for buying it with a 2-year plan is $350, so clearly the termination fee has to be more than T-mobile's $200 to deter people from buying with the plan and then cancelling as a way of getting the bare phone at a discount. Now, $550 is a bit absurd, because it's higher than the cost of the bare phone, but these sorts of fees are often higher than would make sense.
I guess having the fee charged in two separate instances, instead of T-mobile charging one larger fee and then reimbursing Google with part of the money, is a somewhat unusual structuring. But I'm not sure it fundamentally matters?
That fact makes me increasingly interested in just treating the history of games as something to mine for stuff to play. I used to have basically a 1- or 2-year game horizon: what I'm going to play this weekend was determined by choosing from the list of recent games. But now I have more like a 20-year horizon; I might play a recent game this weekend, or I might play a classic game I've heard a lot about that I haven't gotten around to experiencing myself, yet. It seems that as games get taken more seriously as a medium, instead of just throw-away entertainment, it ought to move in that direction. I mean, it's not like avid readers read only new-release best-sellers. Sometimes you do, but sometimes you read Victor Hugo or Isaac Asimov.
Even for new games, there are fortunately still a lot of less-expensive games that come out that can be innovative, and some even manage to get some decent press; World of Goo and Braid are two of the more prominent recent success stories. This year's Indie Game Festival has a lot of interesting stuff, too. Indie games might be even more vibrant than indie film is, these days.
Yeah, I'd second this. Most likely, if the original publisher notices, and you're small fry, they'll just send a C&D, not try to sue you immediately. It's only worth their time to sue right off the bat if they suspect you have deep pockets, e.g. if this clone got distributed through a major publisher.
Even from a purely materialist perspective, it seems reasonable to ponder a class of materials that replicate themselves. How exactly they do so might be more or less complex but the basic idea that it's possible to configure matter in a way that it replicates itself doesn't seem that absurd. And there's no particular reason it has to be DNA --- there are even purely mechanical possibilities.
Unfortunately that's true, but I think it says something about the increasing failure of the public science literature to actually embody advances in knowledge. In a lot of areas, you really cannot replicate the results solely from the published literature--- meaning it's not really science.
In many cases, this is deliberate, because the scientists are playing an academic game on one side of the fence, and working for startups on the other side of the fence, so they go out of their way to make the "public" part of their research omit enough important details that competitors on the private side can't just reimplement it.
It depends on the environment on the amount of enculturation. There are some places with very large foreign-student populations, and very competitive environments, where a Chinese student will essentially come to the US for 5-6 years, work 80+ hour weeks that entire time, mainly associating with other Chinese students in the same situation, and then graduate.
They'll probably still know more about American culture than not coming at all, but to some extent large labs in the physical sciences are a bit of a bubble-world.
I was counting per year ($40k incl. tuition is fairly common as a ballpark figure).
Maybe it varies by the area, but my impression is that funding agencies don't really care about "greater body of scientists doing research" as their ROI, with the exception of specific programs like the NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship program.
They're funding a project, and they want to know if their $500k or $1m or whatever it is, will produce $500k or $1m of research. Sometimes the money doesn't even get primarily spent on grad students, if the PI thinks that hiring more research scientists or postdocs is a better option. But often grad students are the best bang-for-the-buck, because you just can't get other full-time scientific employees for less.
I guess it depends on the lab and the kind of research. There are areas of the lab sciences where the prof has a hypothesis, has pretty much written the paper (or more likely has a postdoc writing it), and needs an army of drones to run a huge pile of experiments and get him/her some numbers. In that case, the job of the grad students is to get the numbers, and there is probably no cheaper way you could possibly get those numbers (research scientists who could successfully run experiments in a modern lab don't work for $25k stipends).
They get a lot of their ROI in direct research, though, not just in the nebulous future-production-of-engineers. If an NSF grant spends $200,000 paying the stipends+tuition of 5 students, and those 5 students end up producing a few journal articles, and once in a while those sets of journal articles include important results, he NSF's gotten its $200,000 worth.
Especially in the lab sciences, you're not paying that PhD student's meagre stipend out of altruism, hoping that they'll one day blossom into a lovely scientist. You're paying it because you need people to do the research: the professor is more of a manager of a large-ish lab so unable to do it him/herself, and hiring actual research scientists on the open market would cost a lot more than $20-25k, and they would expect more reasonable working hours. Considering the proportion of the work that actually gets done by grad students, it's a bargain.
What kind of airlines do you fly on? All the major U.S. domestic carriers do, as far as I can tell. Just now spot-checked Continental, Delta, United, and Southwest.
Are there actually documented cases of someone in an airliner dying or having a medical emergency due solely to peanut particles wafting through the ventilation system? I can't find any, despite the frequent claims that it "could" happen.
Many people with allergies to fur can react to particles in the air as well, or find the smell absolutely revolting. Should we ban dogs and cats from traveling in planes? Admittedly the allergy is rarely fatal--- but the peanut allergy appears not to be in this setting, either, as there is not a single documented case of someone dying due to peanut dust circulating inside an airliner.
Some software, such as GPG, uses primality tests that don't actually converge to arbitrary certainty regardless of the number of iterations, because certain rare types of non-primes known as "pseudoprimes", which satisfy tests that usually only prime numbers satisfy, will pass all iterations. For example, GPG uses the Fermat primality test, which will always pass Carmichael numbers. Since Carmichael numbers are extremely rare, though, it doesn't make a whole lot of practical difference.
(The Miller-Rabin test that you mention doesn't have any such category of pseudoprime.)
I agree it's an interesting question: how do open-source projects fare when acquired by companies that mainly focus on proprietary software?
But the article doesn't usefully attempt to answer that question. It doesn't survey major projects that have been thus acquired, giving us details on the pros and cons each encountered, how many flourished, failed, stagnated, or were unaffected, etc. It doesn't try to figure out what the reasons for success or failure might be. It doesn't really do any analysis.
It just asks the question, rambles on a bit, cites the one single example of MySQL's role in the Oracle acquisition (which hasn't even happened yet), and then we're done. Boring.
From a pure stimulus standpoint, sure, but wouldn't it be nice if we at least got something tangible out of our money too, instead of just consultant reports? At least the make-work programs in the 1930s left us with a bunch of improvements to the national park infrastructure, murals in various public places, etc.--- in fact a good deal of that WPA stuff is still in use.
It's not specifically a tariff, because they charge all electricity sold in MN the same cost, whether generated in- or out-of-state. That makes it more of a sales tax, which is constitutional.
Isn't that equivalent? It's more or less a sales tax on electricity, pro-rated by how much carbon was used to generated the electricity. They could collect the sales tax from the purchaser, or from the seller; usually sales taxes are collected from sellers, because it's easier to administer such a system.
How, exactly, will this force "cleaner" electricity generation?
It makes cleaner electricity generators more competitive because, as you point out, it raises the price of their competitors' product (electricity from coal-fired generators). A tax on a competitor is basically an indirect subsidy.
Naturally, I imagine that this flexible definition is reserved for the Feds use only--no doubt states will have to continue to use the actual definition (ie. what the Constitution actually means).
As far as "what the Constitution actually means", it's not clear that there is actually a blanket ban on states regulating interstate commerce--- there is textually no such ban. It's been inferred from the commerce clause to form the so-called dormant commerce clause. But yes, under existing precedent the dormant commerce clause prohibits a much narrower range of things than the positive commerce clause enables, so states are not automatically prohibited from doing anything that Raich would permit to the U.S. government.
It's not nearly that clear in this case. The tax is only applied to companies doing business in Minnesota, and is only assessed on the portion of their business considered to impact Minnesota (i.e. emissions actually generated in Minnesota, emissions imputed to electricity transmitted in Minnesota, etc.). It's at least arguable that that doesn't violate the dormant commerce clause: MN isn't specifically taxing only imports and exempting in-state MN electricity generators, which is the usual inter/intra-state disparity in treatment that caused constitutional problems; nor is the state attempting to tax companies that don't do business in MN.
Slashdot Mirror
Since YouTube's the most-visited video site on the internet by far (and one of the most-visited sites of any kind), I don't see any evidence that they're failing to deliver the content people want.
The discount for buying it with a 2-year plan is $350, so clearly the termination fee has to be more than T-mobile's $200 to deter people from buying with the plan and then cancelling as a way of getting the bare phone at a discount. Now, $550 is a bit absurd, because it's higher than the cost of the bare phone, but these sorts of fees are often higher than would make sense.
I guess having the fee charged in two separate instances, instead of T-mobile charging one larger fee and then reimbursing Google with part of the money, is a somewhat unusual structuring. But I'm not sure it fundamentally matters?
That fact makes me increasingly interested in just treating the history of games as something to mine for stuff to play. I used to have basically a 1- or 2-year game horizon: what I'm going to play this weekend was determined by choosing from the list of recent games. But now I have more like a 20-year horizon; I might play a recent game this weekend, or I might play a classic game I've heard a lot about that I haven't gotten around to experiencing myself, yet. It seems that as games get taken more seriously as a medium, instead of just throw-away entertainment, it ought to move in that direction. I mean, it's not like avid readers read only new-release best-sellers. Sometimes you do, but sometimes you read Victor Hugo or Isaac Asimov.
Even for new games, there are fortunately still a lot of less-expensive games that come out that can be innovative, and some even manage to get some decent press; World of Goo and Braid are two of the more prominent recent success stories. This year's Indie Game Festival has a lot of interesting stuff, too. Indie games might be even more vibrant than indie film is, these days.
Assassinate the copyright owners, then wait 70 years?
Yeah, I'd second this. Most likely, if the original publisher notices, and you're small fry, they'll just send a C&D, not try to sue you immediately. It's only worth their time to sue right off the bat if they suspect you have deep pockets, e.g. if this clone got distributed through a major publisher.
Even from a purely materialist perspective, it seems reasonable to ponder a class of materials that replicate themselves. How exactly they do so might be more or less complex but the basic idea that it's possible to configure matter in a way that it replicates itself doesn't seem that absurd. And there's no particular reason it has to be DNA --- there are even purely mechanical possibilities.
Unfortunately that's true, but I think it says something about the increasing failure of the public science literature to actually embody advances in knowledge. In a lot of areas, you really cannot replicate the results solely from the published literature--- meaning it's not really science.
In many cases, this is deliberate, because the scientists are playing an academic game on one side of the fence, and working for startups on the other side of the fence, so they go out of their way to make the "public" part of their research omit enough important details that competitors on the private side can't just reimplement it.
It depends on the environment on the amount of enculturation. There are some places with very large foreign-student populations, and very competitive environments, where a Chinese student will essentially come to the US for 5-6 years, work 80+ hour weeks that entire time, mainly associating with other Chinese students in the same situation, and then graduate.
They'll probably still know more about American culture than not coming at all, but to some extent large labs in the physical sciences are a bit of a bubble-world.
I was counting per year ($40k incl. tuition is fairly common as a ballpark figure).
Maybe it varies by the area, but my impression is that funding agencies don't really care about "greater body of scientists doing research" as their ROI, with the exception of specific programs like the NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship program.
They're funding a project, and they want to know if their $500k or $1m or whatever it is, will produce $500k or $1m of research. Sometimes the money doesn't even get primarily spent on grad students, if the PI thinks that hiring more research scientists or postdocs is a better option. But often grad students are the best bang-for-the-buck, because you just can't get other full-time scientific employees for less.
I guess it depends on the lab and the kind of research. There are areas of the lab sciences where the prof has a hypothesis, has pretty much written the paper (or more likely has a postdoc writing it), and needs an army of drones to run a huge pile of experiments and get him/her some numbers. In that case, the job of the grad students is to get the numbers, and there is probably no cheaper way you could possibly get those numbers (research scientists who could successfully run experiments in a modern lab don't work for $25k stipends).
They get a lot of their ROI in direct research, though, not just in the nebulous future-production-of-engineers. If an NSF grant spends $200,000 paying the stipends+tuition of 5 students, and those 5 students end up producing a few journal articles, and once in a while those sets of journal articles include important results, he NSF's gotten its $200,000 worth.
Especially in the lab sciences, you're not paying that PhD student's meagre stipend out of altruism, hoping that they'll one day blossom into a lovely scientist. You're paying it because you need people to do the research: the professor is more of a manager of a large-ish lab so unable to do it him/herself, and hiring actual research scientists on the open market would cost a lot more than $20-25k, and they would expect more reasonable working hours. Considering the proportion of the work that actually gets done by grad students, it's a bargain.
What kind of airlines do you fly on? All the major U.S. domestic carriers do, as far as I can tell. Just now spot-checked Continental, Delta, United, and Southwest.
Plenty of U.S. carriers at least allow small animals in the cabin in pet carriers.
Are there actually documented cases of someone in an airliner dying or having a medical emergency due solely to peanut particles wafting through the ventilation system? I can't find any, despite the frequent claims that it "could" happen.
Many people with allergies to fur can react to particles in the air as well, or find the smell absolutely revolting. Should we ban dogs and cats from traveling in planes? Admittedly the allergy is rarely fatal--- but the peanut allergy appears not to be in this setting, either, as there is not a single documented case of someone dying due to peanut dust circulating inside an airliner.
Some software, such as GPG, uses primality tests that don't actually converge to arbitrary certainty regardless of the number of iterations, because certain rare types of non-primes known as "pseudoprimes", which satisfy tests that usually only prime numbers satisfy, will pass all iterations. For example, GPG uses the Fermat primality test, which will always pass Carmichael numbers. Since Carmichael numbers are extremely rare, though, it doesn't make a whole lot of practical difference.
(The Miller-Rabin test that you mention doesn't have any such category of pseudoprime.)
If we're going to do dragonfly songs, how about this one from DDR.
I agree it's an interesting question: how do open-source projects fare when acquired by companies that mainly focus on proprietary software?
But the article doesn't usefully attempt to answer that question. It doesn't survey major projects that have been thus acquired, giving us details on the pros and cons each encountered, how many flourished, failed, stagnated, or were unaffected, etc. It doesn't try to figure out what the reasons for success or failure might be. It doesn't really do any analysis.
It just asks the question, rambles on a bit, cites the one single example of MySQL's role in the Oracle acquisition (which hasn't even happened yet), and then we're done. Boring.
From a pure stimulus standpoint, sure, but wouldn't it be nice if we at least got something tangible out of our money too, instead of just consultant reports? At least the make-work programs in the 1930s left us with a bunch of improvements to the national park infrastructure, murals in various public places, etc.--- in fact a good deal of that WPA stuff is still in use.
It's not specifically a tariff, because they charge all electricity sold in MN the same cost, whether generated in- or out-of-state. That makes it more of a sales tax, which is constitutional.
Isn't that equivalent? It's more or less a sales tax on electricity, pro-rated by how much carbon was used to generated the electricity. They could collect the sales tax from the purchaser, or from the seller; usually sales taxes are collected from sellers, because it's easier to administer such a system.
It makes cleaner electricity generators more competitive because, as you point out, it raises the price of their competitors' product (electricity from coal-fired generators). A tax on a competitor is basically an indirect subsidy.
As far as "what the Constitution actually means", it's not clear that there is actually a blanket ban on states regulating interstate commerce--- there is textually no such ban. It's been inferred from the commerce clause to form the so-called dormant commerce clause. But yes, under existing precedent the dormant commerce clause prohibits a much narrower range of things than the positive commerce clause enables, so states are not automatically prohibited from doing anything that Raich would permit to the U.S. government.
It's not nearly that clear in this case. The tax is only applied to companies doing business in Minnesota, and is only assessed on the portion of their business considered to impact Minnesota (i.e. emissions actually generated in Minnesota, emissions imputed to electricity transmitted in Minnesota, etc.). It's at least arguable that that doesn't violate the dormant commerce clause: MN isn't specifically taxing only imports and exempting in-state MN electricity generators, which is the usual inter/intra-state disparity in treatment that caused constitutional problems; nor is the state attempting to tax companies that don't do business in MN.